


Hachiko, Reunited

by charade



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Gen, the loud absence of Joshua is really the fifth character here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 04:37:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13263840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charade/pseuds/charade
Summary: Neku keeps returning to wait by the statue of Hachiko, as if he doesn't know how Hachiko's story ends.





	Hachiko, Reunited

Six months later it hits him, waiting alone on a rainy freezing Sunday for the boy who never shows. The Hachiko statue has a thin layer of ice built up on its bronze fur, and Neku runs the tips of his fingers over it.

“Faithful Hachiko, huh?” He speaks to the empty air, hoping, like he always does, that it isn’t as empty as it seems. “You and me both. Waiting.”

Waiting for someone who is never coming back. Isn’t that the end of the story here? A dog waiting and waiting for someone who was never stepping off that train again. And he feels like an idiot for taking this long to realize it. Joshua must have seen the irony as soon as Neku asked him to join them.

He leans up against the base of the statue, feels the chill of it seep through his raincoat, and closes his eyes. The City plays in the background. The sound of the half-frozen rain, bikes and cars sloshing through puddles, car horns and bells. The sound of shopping bags. So many people. If he listens hard enough, it’s almost as if he can still hear their thoughts.

A cell phone. His.

Shiki’s figured him out, he knows - these trips to the statue every Sunday - but she’s kind enough to stay quiet about it. Kinder than he’d be. Kinder than he probably needs. Still. She keeps an eye on him in her own way. The text is an invitation to join her at a cafe on Spain Hill that has some of the best hot chocolate she’s ever had. He can’t help but smile as he reads it, feeling warmer just imagining the hot drink and the sound of her voice.

“Yeah,” he texts back. “Heading over now.”

***

It’s not like he stops visiting Hachiko on Sundays. Sometimes, it’s still their meet up, as a group, even.

“Open invitation,” Neku thinks, as clearly and loudly as he can. “I’m still waiting for you.”

But he starts to miss some afternoons. There’s a festival in Miyashita park, and he goes there instead, and at the end of the day, he feels lighter, somehow, for it. Joshua, he tells himself, can always find him if he wants to.

He isn’t tied to Hachiko’s fate.

***

Still, he goes sometimes.

Sometimes just to people watch. Even a year out, it amazes him how much life there is around him. How much Imagination. He sketches them, sometimes - little fashion trends that catch his eye for Shiki and Eri - but he’s never been one for realism. CAT’s art, Street Art, he is slowly learning, is all about the movement and gestures of life. He has sketchbooks full of the angles between a passing woman’s elbow and hip, the tilt of someone’s neck as they throw their head back in laughter, lines trying to capture the movement of a wave goodbye.

He wonders sometimes how Joshua experiences things. If all of these things are notes to him. And deep in the flow of drawing, sometimes he imagines he can almost hear it, too.

***

Joshua never comes, and Neku learns to see the bronze dog more as a cautionary tale than the story of loyalty it’s meant to be. He’s 18 and done waiting, and he spends a year traveling. Sometimes, he still wonders about the Game, about who the composer is in each new city he falls asleep in, where the players might meet. But the world is so big and so wild and so full of life that it’s hard to wonder too long about the dead. About the past.

He tours art galleries and climbs through abandoned buildings to marvel at the galleries left there by graffiti artists. He leaves bits of himself behind in Detroit and under the city of Paris.

In Hong Kong, he bumps into a stranger on his way to an empty wall, both of them dressed in stained sweatshirts, caring gym bags full of spray cans. They converse in gestures and some broken pidgin as they work together over three weeks, and Neku finds he can’t help but wonder what such a thing would sound like to a composer. Because it feels almost like fighting with psychs again, but without the fear. The adrenaline all creative energy. It’s like he can feel the light puck again, down in this dingy underpass, as they work. It feels like flying.

***

When he gets back to Tokyo, back to Shibuya, he sits by the statute for hours, just watching and listening to the city with new eyes and ears. The words Mr. H had used, of vibrations and Imagination and melodies - do they change when you go away? Did he start to shift, to harmonize with all the places he’d been? Does he still have a place in whatever song Shibuya is singing? Hachiko, ever patient, ever loyal, listens to his questions, his doubts.

***

It becomes a ritual for him, after that, when he comes home to Shibuya, even just for the weekend.

***

It’s his third semester at university and his final project is going nowhere at all. His dorm is littered with rejected drafts and failures. There’s a charcoal smear up the side of his face and he’s pulled at his hair so much that the gel has frozen it into some bizarre mountain spire. He isn’t sure when he last slept. Or showered. His phone tells him it’s almost noon on Sunday.

Might as well, he thinks.

It takes an hour and a half for him to find his way out the gates of Shibuya station and over to the side of the bronze dog.

“Well,” he thinks, “at least you’ll always be here, huh?”

Maybe he’s the one Hachiko is waiting for now.

***

He’s twenty-three years old when Rhyme calls him early one morning in February. Wakes him up with the cheery tune she programmed into his phone years ago when he first got it. It takes him a moment to realize it’s even his phone ringing. They haven’t talked much lately. She’s in college - University of Tokyo - studying well… he couldn’t even understand it last time she tried to explain. She’s going places, though, that’s for sure.

He doesn’t know what to say when he finally manages to get the damn thing to his ear. His brain isn’t awake yet and his coffee maker is all the way on the other side of the apartment. Certainly not within reach of his comfortable bed.

But she’s already talking.

“Neku! I’m back in town and Beat and I are taking you on a trip! Shiki too!” He rubs at his eyes and searches his brain for a response.

“Do I have to pack?”

She laughs at that, her little giggle still like the tinkling of a bell. “No silly. Just a day trip. Meet us at the statue at 10, okay?”

He barely manages a vaguely affirmative sound before collapsing back against his pillow.

Rhyme is perched on Hachiko’s back when he gets there, waving both her arms in his direction. It’s like being thrown back eight years, seeing them all there, Beat leaning against the stone base of it, one hand on his sister's waist as if she’s still a child who might fall off. Shiki’s there too, muffling a giggle with her hand.

It can’t be eight years ago, though, because Shiki’s so much more confident now. Her glasses are slimmer, cut just right to show off her face. And he can tell, even from meters away, that there’s some of her own embroidery on the jacket she’s wearing.

And he doesn’t have his headphones on. That’s different, too.

Sunshine Burger is still there, even if other stores have come and gone, and Beat drags them over to get the most inappropriate of breakfast foods.

“So, Rhyme,” Neku says, in-between bites of a hamburger, “where are you taking us?”

She winks at him, putting a finger over her lips and says “Life is full of surprises.”

Next to her, Beat rolls his eyes. “She’s been like this since she got in yesterday, you know?”

And Neku thinks, it’s been eight years and some things are still so much the same. It’s hard not to think about the Game when they’re all together, especially now that it happens less often. Life, he finds, has a way of being demanding. Of trying to pull you forward and away from who you used to be. Live in the moment, he thinks. And he tries to. But there are parts of his past he wants to carry with him.

“Earth to Neku,” Shiki says, waving a napkin in his face. “You’re doing that thing again.”

“That thing?”

“Yeah, you know.” Beat. “Getting all spacey and distant on us.”

“Oh,” Neku says. They never talk about it. But sometimes he wishes they would.

Rhyme herds them all into the station and towards Hanzomon Line.

“Seriously, Rhyme, where are you taking -” Beat starts, but is cut off by a sharp stare.

***

“Did you switch your focus again?” Shiki asks with a hint of concern as they stare up at the entrance to the Tokyo University School of Agriculture’s campus. “I mean, if you did, that’s fine, but I thought you were really interested in material science?”

“I am!” Rhyme says, and there’s a spark to her declaration that hits Neku square in the chest. Joshua - the Game - had taken Rhyme’s dreams away, long ago. But not her passion.

“That’s not why we’re here.”

“Does that mean you’re gonna finally tell us why we _are_ here?”  Beat says.

Rhyme just bops him on the head and motions for them to follow.

The atmosphere seems to change as they walk through the campus, the way that Neku can feel in the hairs on the back of his neck. They don’t talk, and even Rhyme’s steps seem to carry a sort of grim determination. But then Neku will shake his head and everything will seem normal again, like he’s just imagined it. Still, they walk in silence until Rhyme stops ahead of them.

She rings her hands in her oversized sweatshirt.

“I thought,” she says, quietly, like a completely different person than she was just minutes ago at the entrance, “that you’d all want to see this.”

Beat opens his mouth, probably to ask once again what it is, exactly, that they are meant to see, when Rhyme points behind her.

The world is all angles of motion. Little moments of life captured in positive and negative spaces. Imagination, building itself out of vectors and collisions.

The first thing Neku registers is the sweep of its tail, the arch of it’s back. Then, the shape of the space between the open mouth and the outstretched hand. The full statue comes together in lines and curves. In snapshots.

“That’s… That’s Hachiko, isn’t it?” Shiki says, slowly, carefully, laying the words gently over the scene.

“Woah,” says Beat.

“They put it up a few days ago,” Rhyme says. “It was in some school email. I came to see it, but,” she takes a deep breath. Neku imagines her fumbling with her necklace, though he can’t seem to take his eyes off the statue in front of him. “But it didn’t feel right not coming with all of you.”

“It isn’t in Shibuya, though.” The words leave Neku’s mouth before he can think about what he’s saying or why he’s saying them.

“No,” Shiki says. “But it’s close. We can visit it.”

“It’s not the same, though.”

And Neku realizes that he’s angry. Irrationally, stupidly angry. It’s been years since he waited by that damn statue with any hope that _he’d_ show up. It’s been years since he expected that story to end any differently.

But Hachiko looks… so happy. After all those years. To be reunited with the one he was waiting for, if only in bronze.

“Neku? Are you alright?”

He’s not. He’s really not. He’s 23 years old and for three weeks out of his life, when he was 15, he was dead. He was shot by the god that ruled over his city and forced to fight to save it from a  fate he still doesn’t really understand. And then he waited. Waited for years. Waited longer than he ever admitted to himself. For the bastard who killed him to come back into his life.

Is Joshua even still there? Was he punished for what he did and erased and never even had a chance to show up at all? Hachiko’s owner never came back because he'd died. How had Neku never considered that?

“Neku? You’re shaking.”

Shiki puts a hand on his shoulder and he flinches back. He doesn’t mean to. Doesn’t mean to pull away. Wishes he had leaned into it instead, but. But it’s too much. Too much to remember. Too much to feel.

For the first time in ages, he wants to pull headphones on over his ears and shut out the world.

“I’m just cold,” he manages, and it sounds so much like a lie to himself, he can almost see the Noise forming around him. It’s been eight years. He thought he had moved on. Thought he had let it go. Let him go.

The others are talking. About him, obliquely, if not directly. “Yeah, We should head back. It’s getting pretty chilly. It might snow.”

He follows them back to Shibuya in a daze. The crowds of people distant. Like he could reach out and pass right through them. Like he is slipping back into the UG. He’s worrying his friends, he knows. Probably filling this whole train car with Noise. What does it mean, that he’s moving all this with him from Bunkyo to Shibuya, he wonders.

“You should go home, Neku,” Shiki is saying. They are back at the original Hachiko statue. The one that’s forever waiting. Is it fair that it’s still here when there’s another version of Hachiko jumping into its owner's arms?

His thoughts don’t even make sense anymore.

“Yeah,” he says.

Beat and Rhyme have left. He doesn’t remember saying goodbye to them at all. Shiki leads him over to the bench next to the statue and places a hand on his back. This time, he doesn’t flinch away. Doesn’t lean into it either, just stays still. Like bronze. Like Hachiko.

They never talk about it, not really. And even when they used to, years ago, Neku was never able to talk about him. The others, they never understood. Never understood why Neku wasn’t glad to be rid of Joshua.

Neku isn’t sure he understands either. His chest aches, where the bullets went through him. Joshua, in all his snobbery, in all his grandiosity, had put the second shot through the exact same place. This whole city should be dead, really, shouldn’t it? Because Neku… Neku is the type of person to wait for eight years for his murderer to come back to him.

He wishes WildKat were still open. Wishes it hadn’t vanished after the game with a sign promising to reopen in a new location. A location none of them could ever find. CAT kept making art, and Neku still clings to that, he realizes.

He’s never really let go.

***

He lets Shiki walk him back to his apartment, to his unfinished canvases and empty coffee mugs. She offers to stay, but Neku turns her down.

“This will pass, Neku,” she says. “It always does.” And he knows she’s talking from experience. From eight years of it. He wishes he knew what to say in return.

When he’s alone in his room, he opens up the windows to the frigid February air and lets the sounds and smell of the city wash over him.

“Hey Josh,” He says, out loud, and feels foolish and childish for doing something he stopped doing when he was 16 years old. “I just thought you should know where I went today.”  


**Author's Note:**

> The statue of Hachiko and his owner, Ueno Hidesaburo, went up in February 2015 at the Tokyo University School of Agriculture, where Ueno commuted to every day and where he passed away.


End file.
